“Yes, so I believe. They were brave but foolish. There are ways of doing these things. The point is not to kill hundreds, or be killed. The point is to make the Iraqi occupation army constantly nervous, always afraid, needing to escort every officer whenever he travels, never able to sleep in peace.”
“Look, Mr. English, I know you mean well, but I suspect you are a man accustomed to these things and skilled at them. I am not. These Iraqis are a cruel and savage people. We know them of old. If we do what you say, there will be reprisals.”
“It is like rape, Mr. Al-Khalifa.”
“Rape?”
“When a woman is to be raped, she can fight back or succumb. If she is docile, she will be violated, probably beaten, maybe killed. If she fights, she will be violated, certainly beaten, maybe killed.”
“Kuwait is the woman, Iraq the rapist. This I already know. So why fight back?”
“Because there is tomorrow. Tomorrow Kuwait will look in the mirror. Your son will see the face of a warrior.”
Ahmed Al-Khalifa stared at the dark-faced, bearded Englishman for a long time, then he said:
“So will his father. Let Allah have mercy on my people. What is it you want? Money?”
“Thank you, no. I have money.”
He had in fact ten thousand Kuwaiti dinars, abstracted from the ambassador in London, who had drawn it from the Bank of Kuwait, on the corner of Baker Street and George Street.
“I need houses to stay in. Six of them.”
“No problem. There are already thousands of abandoned apartments—”
“Not apartments. Detached villas. Apartments have neighbors. No one will investigate a poor man engaged to caretake an abandoned villa.”
“I will find them.”
“Also identity papers. Real Kuwaiti ones. Three in all. One for a Kuwaiti doctor, one for an Indian accountant, and one for a market gardener from out of town.
“All right. I have friends in the Interior Ministry. I think they still control the presses that produce the ID
cards. What about the picture on them?”
“For the market gardener, find an old man on the street. Pay him. For the doctor and the accountant, choose men among your staff who look roughly like me but are clean-shaven. These photographs are notoriously bad.
“Lastly, cars. Three. One white station wagon, one four-wheel-drive jeep, one old and battered pickup truck. All in lock-up garages, all with new plates.”
“Very well, it will be done. The ID cards and the keys to the garages and houses—where will you collect them?”
“Do you know the Christian cemetery?”
Al-Khalifa frowned.
“I’ve heard of it, I’ve never been there. Why?”
“It’s on the Jahra road in Sulaibikhat, next to the main Moslem cemetery. A very obscure gate with a tiny notice saying: For Christians. Most of the tombstones are for Lebanese and Syrians, with some Filipinos and Chinese. In the far right-hand corner is one for a merchant seaman, Shepton. The marble slab is loose. Under it I have scraped a cavity in the gravel. Leave them there. If you have a message for me, same thing. Check the grave once a week for messages from me.”
Al-Khalifa shook his head in bewilderment.
“I’m not cut out for this sort of thing.”
Mike Martin disappeared into the maelstrom of people who teemed through the narrow streets and alleys of the Bneid-al-Qar district. Five days later, under Able Seaman Shepton’s tombstone he found three identity cards, three sets of garage keys with locations, three sets of ignition keys, and six sets of house keys with addresses on their tags.
Two days later, an Iraqi truck coming back into town from the Umm Gudayr oil field was blown to fragments by something it ran over.
Chip Barber, the head of the CIA’s Middle East Division, had been in Tel Aviv for two days when the phone in the office they had given him at the U.S. embassy rang. It was the CIA’s Head of Station on the line.
“Chip, it’s okay. He’s back in town. I fixed a meeting for four o’clock. That gives you time to grab the last flight out of Ben-Gurion for Stateside. The guys say they’ll come by the office and pick us up.”
The Head of Station was calling from outside the embassy, so he spoke in generalities in case the line was tapped. It was tapped, of course, but only by the Israelis, who knew anyway.
The “he” was General Yaacov “Kobi” Dror, head of the Mossad; the office was the embassy itself, and the guys were the two men from Dror’s personal staff, who arrived in an anonymous car at ten minutes after three.
Barber thought fifty minutes was a lot of time to get from the embassy compound to the headquarters of the Mossad, which is situated in an office tower called the Hadar Dafna building on King Saul Boulevard.
But that was not where the meeting was to be. The car sped northward out of town, past Sde Dov military airfield, until it picked up the coastal highway to Haifa.
Just outside Herzlia is situated a large apartment-and-hotel resort called simply the Country Club. It is a place where some Israelis but mainly elderly Jews from abroad come to relax and enjoy the numerous health and spa facilities the place boasts. These happy folk seldom glance up the hill above the resort.
If they did, they would see, perched on the top, a rather splendid building commanding fine views over the surrounding countryside and the sea. If they asked what it was, they would be told it is the Prime Minister’s summer residence.
The Prime Minister of Israel is indeed permitted to come there, one of very few who are, for this is the Mossad training school, known inside the Mossad as the Midrasha.
Yaacov Dror received the two Americans in his top-floor office, a light, airy room with the air conditioning turned up high. A short, chunky man, he wore the regulation Israeli short-sleeve, open-neck shirt and smoked the regulation sixty cigarettes a day.
Barber was glad for the air conditioning; smoke played havoc with his sinuses.
The Israeli spy chief rose from his desk and came lumbering forward.
“Chip, my old friend, how are you these days?”
He embraced the tall American in a hug. It pleased him to rumble like a bad Jewish character actor and play the friendly, genial bear. All an act. In previous missions as a senior operative, as a katsa , he had proved he was very clever and extremely dangerous.
Chip Barber greeted him back. The smiles were as fixed as the memories were long. And it had not been that long since an American court had sentenced Jonathan Pollard of Navy Intelligence to a very long prison term for spying for Israel, an operation that had certainly been run against America by the genial Kobi Dror.
After ten minutes they came to the grist: Iraq.
“Let me tell you, Chip, I think you are playing it exactly right,” said Dror, helping his guest to another cup of coffee that would keep him awake for days. He stubbed his third cigarette into a big glass ashtray.
Barber tried not to breathe but had to give up. “If we have to go in,” he said, “if he won’t quit Kuwait and we have to go in, we’ll start with air power.”
“Of course.”
“And we’ll be going for his weapons of mass destruction. That’s in your interest, too, Kobi. We need some cooperation here.”
“Chip, we’ve been watching those WMDs for years. Dammit, we’ve been warning about them. Who do you think all that poison gas, those germ and plague bombs, are destined for? Us. We were warning and warning, and no one took any notice. Nine years ago we blew apart his nuclear generators at Osirak, set him back ten years in his quest for a bomb. The world condemned us. America too.”
“That was cosmetic. We all know that.”
“Okay, Chip, so now it’s American lives on the line, it’s not ‘cosmetic’ anymore. Real Americans might die.”
“Kobi, your paranoia is showing.”
“Bullshit. Look, it suits us for you to blow away all his poison gas plants, and his plague laboratories, and his atom bomb research. It suits us fine. And w
e even get to stay out of it because now Uncle Sam has Arab allies. So who’s complaining? Not Israel. We have passed you everything we have on his secret weapons programs. Everything we have. No holding back.”
“We need more, Kobi. Okay, maybe we neglected Iraq a bit these past years. We had the cold war to deal with. Now it’s Iraq, and we’re short of product. We need information—not street-level garbage, but real, high-level paydirt. So I’m asking you straight: Do you have any asset working for you, high in the Iraqi regime? We have questions to put, and we need answers. And we’ll pay—we know the rules.”
There was silence for a while. Kobi Dror contemplated the tip of his cigarette. The other two senior officers looked at the table in front of them.
“Chip,” said Dror slowly, “I give you my word. If we were running any agent right up inside the councils of Baghdad, I’d tell you. I’d pass it all over. Trust me, I don’t.”
General Dror would later explain to his Prime Minister, a very angry Itzhak Shamir, that at the time he spoke he was not lying. But he really ought to have mentioned Jericho.
Chapter 6
Mike Martin saw the youth first, or the Kuwaiti boy would have died that day. He was driving his battered, stained, and rusty pickup truck, its rear laden with watermelons he had bought at one of the outlying farms near Jahra, when he saw the white-linen-dressed head pop up and down from behind a pile of rubble by the roadside, He also caught the tip of the rifle the boy was carrying before it disappeared behind the rubble.
The truck was serving its purpose well. He had asked for it in its present condition because he guessed, rightly, that sooner or later—probably sooner—the Iraqi soldiers would start confiscating smart-looking cars for their own use.
He glanced in his rearview mirror, braked, and swerved off the Jahra road. Coming up behind him was a truck full of soldiers of the Popular Army.
The Kuwaiti youth was trying to hold the speeding truck in the sights of his rifle when a hard hand closed over his mouth and another pulled the rifle away from his grip.
“I don’t think you really want to die today, do you?” a voice growled in his ear. The truck rolled past, and the moment to take a potshot at it vanished as well. The boy had been frightened enough by his own actions; now he was terrified.
When the truck disappeared, the grip on his face and head relaxed. He twisted free and rolled onto his back. Crouching over him was a tall, bearded, hard-looking Bedou.
“Who are you?” he muttered.
“Someone who knows better than to kill one Iraqi when there are twenty others in the same truck.
Where’s your getaway vehicle?”
“Over there,” said the boy, who appeared to be about twenty, trying hard to grow his first beard. It was a motor scooter, on its stand twenty yards away near some trees. The Bedou sighed. He laid down the rifle, an old Lee Enfield .303 that the boy must have gotten from an antique store, and walked the youth firmly to the pickup.
He drove the short distance back to the rock pile; the rifle went under the watermelons. Then he drove to the motor scooter and hefted it on top of the cargo of fruit. Several melons burst.
“Get in,” he said.
They drove to a quiet spot near Shuwaikh Port and stopped.
“Just what did you think you were doing?” asked the Bedou.
The boy stared out through the fly-spotted windshield. His eyes were moist, and his lip trembled.
“They raped my sister. A nurse—at the Al Adan hospital. Four of them. She is destroyed.”
The Bedou nodded.
“There will be much of that,” he said. “So you want to kill Iraqis?”
“Yes, as many as I can. Before I die.”
“The trick is not to die. If that is what you want, I think I had better train you, or you won’t last a day.”
The boy snorted.
“The Bedouin do not fight.”
“Ever heard of the Arab Legion?” The youth was silent. “And before them, Prince Faisal and the Arab Revolt? All Bedouin. Are there any more like you?”
The youth turned out to be a law student, studying at Kuwait University before the invasion.
“There are five of us. We all want the same. I chose to be the first to try.”
“Memorize this address,” said the Bedou. He gave it—a villa in a back street in Yarmuk. The boy got it wrong twice, then right. Martin made him repeat it twenty times.
“Seven o’clock tonight. It will be dark. But curfew is not till ten. Arrive separately. Park at least two hundred yards away and walk the rest. Enter at two-minute intervals. The gate and door will be open.”
He watched the boy ride away on his scooter and sighed. Pretty basic material, he thought, but for the moment it’s all I’ve got.
The young people turned up on time. He lay on a flat roof across the street and watched them. They were nervous and unsure, glancing over their shoulders, darting into gateways, then out again. Too many Bogart movies. When they were all inside, he gave them ten more minutes. No Iraqi security men appeared. He slipped down from his roof, crossed the road, and entered the house from the back. They were sitting in the main room with the lights on and the curtains undrawn. Four young men and a girl, dark and very intense.
They were looking toward the door to the hall when he entered from the kitchen. One minute he was not there, and the next he was. The youngsters had one glimpse of him before he reached out and switched off the light.
“Draw the curtains,” he said quietly. The girl did it. Woman’s work. Then he put the light back on.
“Never sit in a lighted room with the curtains open,” he said. “You do not want to be seen together.”
He had divided his six residences into two groups. In four he lived, flitting from one to another in no particular sequence. Each time, he left tiny signs for himself—a leaf wedged in the doorjamb, a tin can on the step. If ever they were missing, he would know the house had been visited. In the other two he stored half the gear he had brought in from its grave in the desert. The place he had chosen to meet the students was the least important of his dwelling places, and now one he would never use again to sleep in.
They were all students, except one who worked in a bank. He made them introduce themselves.
“Now you need new names.” He gave them each a new name. “You tell no one else—not friends, parents, brothers, anyone —those names. Whenever they are used, you know the message comes from one of us.
“What do we call you?” asked the girl, who had just become Rana.
“The Bedou,” he said. “It will do. You—what is this address again?”
The young man he pointed at thought, then produced a slip of paper. Martin took it from him.
“No pieces of paper. Memorize everything. The Popular Army may be stupid but the Secret Police are not. If you are frisked, how do you explain this?”
He made the three who had written down the address burn their slips of paper.
“How well do you know your city?”
“Pretty well,” said the oldest of them, the twenty-five-year-old bank clerk.
“Not good enough. Buy maps tomorrow, street maps. Study as if for your final exams. Learn every street and alley, every square and garden, every boulevard and lane, every major public building, every mosque and courtyard. You know the street signs are coming down?”
They nodded. Within fifteen days of the invasion, after recovering from their shock, the Kuwaitis were beginning a form of passive resistance, of civil disobedience. It was spontaneous and uncoordinated. One of the moves was the ripping down of street signs. Kuwait is a complicated city to start with; deprived of street signs, it became a maze.
Iraqi patrols were already becoming comprehensively lost. For the Secret Police, finding a suspect’s address was a nightmare. At main intersections, sign posts were being ripped up in the night or turned around.
That first night, Martin gave them two hours on basic security. Always have a cover story t
hat checks out, for any journey and any rendezvous. Never carry incriminating paper. Always treat Iraqi soldiers with respect verging on deference. Confide in no one.
“From now on you are two people. One is the original you, the one everyone knows, the student, the clerk. He is polite, attentive, law-abiding, innocent, harmless. The Iraqis will leave him alone because he does not threaten them. He never insults their country, their flag, or their leader. He never comes to the attention of the AMAM. He stays alive and free. Only on a special occasion, on a mission, does the other person appear. He will become skilled and dangerous and still stay alive.”
He taught them about security. To attend a meeting at a rendezvous, turn up early, park well away. Go into the shadows. Watch for twenty minutes. Look at the surrounding houses. Check for heads on the roof, the waiting ambush party. Be alert for the scuff of a soldier’s boot on gravel, the glow of a cigarette, the clink of metal on metal.
When they still had time to get home before the curfew, he dismissed them. They were disappointed.
“What about the invaders? When do we start killing them?”
“When you know how.”
“Is there nothing we can do?”
“When the Iraqis move about, how do they do it? Do they march?”
“No, they use trucks, vans, jeeps, stolen cars,” said the law student.
“Which have petrol caps,” said the Bedou, “which come off with a quick twist. Sugar lumps—twenty lumps per petrol tank. It dissolves in the petrol, passes through the carburetor, and turns to hard caramel in the heat of the engine. It destroys the engine. Be careful not to be caught. Work in pairs and after dark.
One keeps watch, the other slips in the sugar. Replace the petrol cap. It takes ten seconds.
“A piece of plywood, four inches by four, with four sharpened steel nails through it. Drop it down under your thob till it slips out by your feet. Nudge it with your toe under the leading edge of the tire of a stationary vehicle.
“There are rats in Kuwait, so there are shops that sell rat poison. Buy the white, strychnine-based kind.
Buy dough from a baker. Mix in the poison, using rubber gloves, then destroy the gloves. Bake up the bread in the kitchen oven, but only, when you are alone in the house.”